Unofficial news and tips about Google

June 22, 2009

Chrome Tests an Updated New Tab Page

Chromium, the open source version of Google Chrome, includes a more customizable new tab page. You can easily pin, remove and reorder thumbnails without having to enter in the edit mode. Pinned items are always displayed in the new tab page, which now shows only 8 thumbnails, even if they're no longer frequently visited.

The list of search engines and the recent bookmarks have been removed and there's a new section of recent activities that includes recently-closed tabs and recent downloads. Another new section is called "recommendations", but it's still a work in progress.

You can hide the thumbnails, hide the list of recent activities and the recommendations if you don't find them useful.

The updated tab page is not yet ready to be released, but you can enable it if you have a recent Chromium build (Windows, Mac, Linux) by editing the desktop shortcut and adding the following flag in the target field:

I like the concept of the about:tab Firefox experimental add-on from Mozilla Labs. Is fetching and showing in the new tab page the latest feeds from the sites you access more often, shows "search in google" for the clipboard content, and quick search boxes for the sites you use more often too, in the context of the "Frequently Visited Sites".It doesn't have thumbnails, so it loads fast, and is useful. I wish Chromium would take some ideas from it.The "recommendations" part sound great, but let's see how it works! Would that be similar to the "Interesting items" in Google Web History?

@Anon1: You should read this, http://bit.ly/4nz8LC, but instead of --enable-extensions, use --new-new-tab-page flag.

@Anon2: The developers of Google Chrome used Chromium for experimentation, changes and updates. Making a web browser is ain't easy, before it takes to public, it passes into Chromium, then to Chrome (dev), Chrome (beta) then to stable. But likewise, let's wait for this coming in the later stages like Chrome's dev and beta.

what i would like to see:1. display the old search boxes in the new tab page and way to hide them as well like with the drop down menu. the ability to add custom search fields there. currently there is no way to edit which fields are included and a paste a search for those fields as well.

I think it is very interesting how the modern browser is integrating/replacing what were previously web services, like netvibes for a custom start page and stumbleupon for recommendations, I know that Chrome's start page is no where neer as customizable as either of these but it is much more accesible to the average user.

The one feature I really want is the abbility to do a site search on my bookmarks instead of having to add them as search engines.

"Working as intended. There has been much internal debate about this issue in the past which I will not reiterate here, except to summarize. Master passwords as implemented in other browsers provide more of an illusion of security than actual security. They also inconvenience users. Chrome uses the Windows crypto routines to encrypt local passwords, giving you some protection against remote data theft; for local data theft a master password wouldn't help."

I never bookmarked anything but this stupid list of recent bookmarks appears - in fact it's just recent history. I want to remove this feature but it seems that I can't unless I am an advanced Linux programmer or something........agh.

HATE the new tab look. Who thought a list view was cool? Dumb and ugly. They wasted their development efforts on that???We have 20+ inch monitors available throughout the industry and they limit us to a 4 x 2 format? Why? the 3 x 3 was easier on the eyes for sure. Please consider QUICKLY adding in options to allow 3 x 3, 4 x 2, 4 x 4 so we can effectively use our monitor space. Only have 8 is too limiting for most of us.

Removing the most commonly used search engines boxes is a step backwards... What could possibly be the reason why the new-new-tab-page removes these?! Search engine wars anyone? This debacle gives the clearest reason as to why it's such a bad idea to use an internet browser created by an internet search engine company.

Apparently, very few people used that feature and it was redundant: the Omnibox lets you use your favorite search engines. Google doesn't need to prevent you from using other search engines: it's already the leading search engine and people use it because it's better than other search engines.

Still, there was a useful list of your most recently bookmarked pages which are now buried on the bottom of the list. And 8 thumbnails can't be better than 9. Bring back the old page or at least make it customizable so the people that use these options can do it.